Commune, also called people’s commune, Chinese (Pinyin) renmin gongshe, (Wade-Giles romanization) jen-min kung-she, type of large rural organization introduced in China in 1958. Communes began as amalgamations of collective farms; but, in contrast to the collectives, which had been engaged exclusively in agricultural activities, the communes were to become multipurpose organizations for the direction of local government and the management of all economic and social activity. Each commune was organized into progressively larger units: production teams, production brigades, and the commune itself.

As a basic unit of China’s socialist system, the commune reflected the often abrupt changes in political and economic policy after 1949. While the commune’s trilevel structure was retained, constant conflict revolved around the issues of local decision making, ownership of private plots of land, and payment of wages. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), individuals forfeited their private plots to common ownership and wages were equalized. After the economic difficulties of 1959–61, however, the communes were reorganized. Their average size was reduced, more autonomy was granted the local production teams, private plots were returned to farmers, and wages were paid according to the work performed.

The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) brought strict regimentation and a loss of local control to the communes. Responsibility for production decisions rose to the production-brigade and commune levels and was often assumed by party cadres and even the army. This period of turmoil was succeeded—especially after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976—by modernizing reforms that granted unprecedented local and individual autonomy to the communes in communist China. After 1979 the communes were gradually dismantled, and farmers were encouraged to cultivate private plots and sell the produce for profit.

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As the Second Five-Year Plan—which resembled its predecessor—got under way in 1958, the policy of the Great Leap Forward was announced. In agriculture this involved forming communes, abolishing private plots, and increasing output through greater cooperation and greater physical effort. In industry the construction of large plants was to continue, but it was to be supplemented by a...

...production force through a radical reorganization of rural production. The search for the best organizational form to achieve this result led in August 1958 to popularization of the “people’s commune,” a huge rural unit that pooled the labour of tens of thousands of peasants from different villages in order to increase agricultural production, engage in local industrial production,...

Thus it was logical that he should endorse and promote the establishment of “people’s communes” as part of the Great Leap strategy. As a result, the peasants, who had been organized into cooperatives in 1955–56 and then into fully socialist collectives in 1956–57, found their world turned upside down once again in 1958. Neither the resources nor the administrative...